Amazon introduces low cost Glacier storage

ONLINE BOOKSELLER Amazon has introduced Glacier, a low cost, use it when you need it backup and archival system.

Glacier is cheap to use, and is likely to upset the backup market status quo. Amazon says that it is designed to be used to save material that needs to be accessed only infrequently but must be preserved all the same.

When Amazon says it's low cost you can believe it. Backup starts at $0.01 per GB per month, according to the offer we've seen. We've asked for more information, but for now it looks like you can store one TB in Amazon's cloud for $10 a month.

"Amazon Glacier is optimised for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable," says the online bookseller.

"Companies typically over-pay for data archiving. [They're] forced to make an expensive upfront payment for their archiving solution... have to guess what their capacity requirements will be, [and] understandably over-provision to make sure they have enough capacity for data redundancy and unexpected growth."

Amazon says that users can store large or small amounts of data in Glacier, adding that it is available from its datacentres in Ireland, east and west America and Japan.

Users pay only for what they use and Amazon said that archiving to and retrieving from the system is easy.

It suggests that users store digital media archives, financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data, long-term database backups, and the sort of data that must be kept for regulatory compliance. µ